


FMA: Meta and Worldbuilding

by Morgrim



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Twins, Automail, Automail Recovery Timelines, Gen, Meta, Science, Science of FMA, Sleeping Patterns, The Gate - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-09-15 17:39:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16937748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgrim/pseuds/Morgrim
Summary: A selection of mini-essays about how the world of Fullmetal Alchemist works, plus some personal headcanons.





	1. What Makes an Alchemist?

**Author's Note:**

> All contents here apply to my canonverse fics unless otherwise stated on the fic. I'm pulling my stuff off Tumblr in case fandom gets purged.

I've seen fics were not everyone has the 'potential' to be an alchemist, sometimes to the point that not everyone has a Gate, as a way of explaining why there are so few alchemists while also resolving the 'but alchemy is science not magic!' issue.

I'm wondering more if it's like playing an instrument. There is a school of violin teaching called the "Suzuki Method" which starts very young and involves a lot of learning by rote. Done properly it's meant to make learning the instrument like learning a language, building one step after the other, and the technical skills like reading sheet music are added as the child is ready. In practice, most Suzuki trained kids I knew (and I knew a LOT, the classical music scene in my hometown was disproportionately huge) looked like prodigies… until they hit their mid teens, because they could play very impressive pieces by heart and that was about it. They failed epically at the more advanced skills. Most of them had been drilled in their instrument and either didn't have the knack for it to encourage them to push further or just had no interest.

Whereas the good players (a few of the Suzuki, but more of them the kids that convinced their parents to get them lessons when they were older instead of it being the parents' idea) could have a completely new piece of music put before them and figure out how to play it and how to ornament it and weren't restricted to a single hand position because you could transpose in your head, and actually knew or at least were interested in what the whole 'by fifths/by thirds/complimentary harmonics' etc nonsense was.

So. Starting alchemy texts, the sort very basic publicly available primers would have, are basically like those art books that say "draw a circle here then a circle there then there is a do magic step and hey you have a picture of an owl". The sort that don't really explain WHY the shapes are the way they are and the whole 3D bits and form, they're more "how to copy this pose".

These books will tell you how to use a compass and protractor and ruler to draw an array, and it will be a very detailed circle because it explains every last detail of the transmutation, and then you can try using it to make a little clay shape or paper crane whatever without really knowing what you're doing. The teens that manage to pull this off and ask why and how and "okay but what if i do x, what happens then?" are the ones that go on to seek out more and experiment and if they're still interested learn enough to get apprenticeships.

This means there are probably a larger pool of people who are not alchemists but with a lot of coaching may be able to pull off a beginner array by rote. However if you threw them through a human transmutation circle they wouldn't see their Gate and wouldn't pay a toll, because they don't know enough to comprehend their Gate; kind of like the difference between being able to play Wonderwall on a guitar or Chopsticks on a piano by rote and being able to pick up a piece of sheet music and work out how turn it into melody.

Evidence for this is the unique designs on each Gate we're shown in the series; they all reflect some aspect of the alchemist's studies, and tellingly of the things they studied as an apprentice. Roy has elements of flame alchemy; Ed has the Sephirothic Tree of Life which is about the application of mathematics and biology to the quantification of the soul; Al has The Marrow of Alchemy, which is about how alchemy is deceptive and you have to look deeper and think carefully about what you're attempting and why. A non-alchemist may possess a Gate but one still not fully defined and so unable to be entered, and if you gain no knowledge you'd pay no toll.

(It would take someone else to drag the victim in though, because if you _can_ activate a human transmutation circle your Gate has long since solidified.)


	2. How Team Mustang Sleeps

Most hotels the military stumps up for aren’t very high end, and so don’t have a great variety of room types. Namely, they tend to have either one or two double beds in them. Since the military also won’t pay for wasted space, sharing a bed with a teammate isn't unusual. This means the members of Team Mustang all have some idea of the others' sleeping habits.

Roy is an octopus. Is it an object in proximity to him? It will be hugged. If it tries to move or detach the sleeping Roy, it will be hugged tighter. This has led to some embarrassing situations, either when the hugee does not respond well, the person is not someone that should be hugged (both Armstrong siblings, for very different reasons), or when his team thinks it's funny to slide something into his arms. If there are an odd number of people Roy usually gets the bed to himself, and it’s not because of rank.

Riza has two sleep modes: a very light dozer or capable of sleeping through an artillery drill. The former happens when she's stressed or in a war zone. The latter means she feels safe or has pushed herself to utter exhaustion. It embarrasses her a little; she feels snipers are supposed to wake on a hair trigger, and in a warzone she can, but once on stakeout she slept so deeply came to with Breda checking her pulse to make sure she was alive.

Breda and Havoc are both blanket hogs. Breda sleeps on his back and Havoc on his front, so if you arrange things right the pair can share a bed with minimal strife by balancing out the blankets and tucking them in. If you don't arrange things right, the pair will toss and turn all night repeatedly snatching the rugs back and forth.

Falman overheats easily. In his dorm room and anywhere he can get away with it he sleeps in boxers at most; on missions he sleeps in light pjs or a nightshirt, but always ends up kicking the blankets off. Spending time in Briggs made this worse because now Amestris weather feels even more stifling. If Breda and Havoc aren't sharing, Falman is likely paired with one of them.

Fuery curls up in the fetal position. Havoc joked one all-nighter that he'd fit comfortably in Black Hayate's basket and dared him to try. Riza came in to find Fuery fast asleep in a little ball with her dog curled up on top of him and decided they were too adorable to disturb.

Ed is a sprawler. Under normal circumstances he will consume as much of the bed space as possible, sometimes in very unusual positions. When cold is aggravating his automail ports Ed transforms into a heat-seeking missile, snuggling tightly against the nearest available heat source. The rest of the team have decided that logically if it is chill Ed should share with Roy, but are concerned the hotel room may not survive the aftermath when the two wake up cuddling each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [There](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/328732493878394881/521909797839306773/C23qx22XUAE0U2M.jpg) are [multiple](https://static.zerochan.net/Roy.Mustang.full.816613.jpg) pieces of official art showing Roy wrapped around large pillows. In my experience everyone who latches onto pillows will also latch onto any person or vaguely squishy object nearby. (Also it is funny to slide a giant plush squid into their arms and wait for the reactions when they wake up.)


	3. On Automail Recovery Timelines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A quick analysis of what the automail treatment and recovery process is probably like, with break downs of how long each step would take and some of the science behind it. With bonus discussion of Ed and Lan Fan's excessively fast recovery, and the realisation that Rush Valley likely has a glockenspiel orchestra.

A limb amputation takes 4 to 8 weeks to heal. While port surgery can happen after the initial injury it'll still involve a very large wound, so we can use that as our guideline for the surrounding flesh and skin to recover. (If anything, having a big foreign object in the way may make it take longer.)

Conventional nerve injuries come in multiple types. The most minor, neurapraxia, takes anywhere between several days and three months to heal. The others are listed as 'much longer', but I haven't found much about recovery times for severed and surgically rejoined nerves because it seems to vary so much by technique and location, but sources suggest nerves heal at about an inch per month and I've not found anything that suggests less than a month recovery time, so let's take 4 weeks as our minimum.

These days most pins used to fix broken bones are made from titanium or a titanium alloy. This is because the surface structure of titanium tricks the body into thinking it 'belongs' and allows the bone to fuse itself to the metal, a process called osseointegration. Once the process is complete the metal cannot be removed and the join is just as strong as natural tissue, which would be ideal for automail. However, just as broken bones can take a long time to heal, so it takes time for osseointegration to finish. A decent strength can be achieved by 12 weeks and full bonding by 16.

We're told that automail is heavy; you probably don't want to be attaching a limb until you know that the port can support it without the patient suffering any damage. Something small like a finger (…do automail fingers exist?) will take at least a month before the nerves are ready and nothing will start bleeding, while for something like a limb you'll want 3 to 4 months for everything to settle and to make sure the screws attaching the port can hold the automail's weight.

Figuring out how long it takes to learn to use newly attached automail is trickier. Neurogenic muscle atrophy is what happens when nerve damage results in an unusable limb (as opposed to disuse atrophy where the limb is unusable for physical reasons and is less severe) and once you fix the underlying causes takes at least 12 weeks to fix. Stroke recovery starts around this time bracket and up. Modern artificial limbs take 6 to 12 months to learn. Taken together, we can estimate at least 3 months for gross controlled movement (ie no longer smacking yourself with your own arm or able to walk a few steps without face planting), 6 months for being able to do general tasks like walking without crutches or putting your clothes on (but probably not doing up your buttons) and 12+ months for full function. It'd also take around 6-12 months to build up the increased muscle mass to compensate for the heavier limbs and to adapt to your changed gait and balance.

That means for most adults automail recovery times are going to start at 16 months and go up from there, with longer times if one can't get as much physical therapy. Ed managed it in 12 months and it can be assumed that more limbs equals longer overall recovery time, which is impressive. He did have two advantages though: firstly that he was still a kid at the time. The slow part of port recovery is the osseointegration. But children's bones heal about twice as fast as adults and a smaller limb means lighter automail, meaning he'd be able to be fitted after 2 months instead of 4. His other advantage is living with the Rockbells and having constant access to people who can help him with his physical therapy, letting him cut 12+ months down to 10.

Lan Fan is another matter. She doesn't have the advantage of youth (by mid teens bone healing rates are rapidly approaching adult ones) and even if she pushed herself to start rehab early using some additional limb support 3 months is just not enough. However! She does have another form of cheating: namely, medical alkestry. If someone could help her heal faster she could get her automail attached earlier. Even at 6 months she'd not have full usage of her new arm though nor time to finish building up the muscle strength. It's likely her fight wrenched some muscles in her shoulder and that she was using her other training to compensate for not being able to hit precisely where she was wanting to slash. (And against a homunculi lacking vital organs and instant kill locations, sheer weight of slashes is what will do the trick in the end anyway.)

This does assume she has access to alkestry. We don't know where she was while Ling was on the run with Ed and co, so she may have slipped back into Xing for medical treatment. It's also possible she was able to find help within Amestris; we know there are organised smuggling rings working on both sides of the desert and a small community of xingese expats, so while any alkestrist would keep quiet about their skills (to avoid being conscripted by the military) it's plausible Fu's connections could find one.

Alternatively, there _are_ rare individuals who have bones that mend abnormally fast (so an adult with child healing rates) or who can regenerate nerve damage better than others and some interesting studies being done on why, but said studies are tricky given that nobody will _know_ they’re in this category until they get themselves badly hurt and confuse the doctors by mending swifter than anticipated. Which leads to an interesting test: what ARE Lan Fan’s scars like? Less severe than Edwards? If so, that’s evidence for her getting a boost with alkestry. If they’re worse (and Ed’s are particularly bad because he was pushing himself so hard) then that suggests her recovery speed was due to other factors.

Interesting side notes: nerve healing requires increased Vitamins D and E, copper and selenium. The latter three can all be found in sunflower oil, with liver and nuts also being good sources. Patients recovering from automail surgery probably snack on a lot of trail mix and get put in deck chairs for a few hours a day. Rush Valley seems likely to have some nice relaxing parks with the odd sets of parallel bars for outdoor therapy.

The most widely used test of osseointegration progress is percussion analysis, where the external part of an implant is tapped with a dental tool. The pitch and tone of the ringing tells you how stable the implant is; still healing implants sound dull and low pitched while a fully healed one gives a higher pitched crystal ring. Mechanics performing port surgery are likely to have a good musical ear. Imagine apprentices learning the glockenspiel as part of their studies. Rush Valley probably has a nice glockenspiel orchestra.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a light reworking of the same post on my Tumblr, now with more Lan Fan.


	4. The Problem of Basque Gran

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Basque Gran suffers from vastly different characterisations between the manga and the first anime. How to fix this in works pulling from both? Twins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ie "How Morgrim solves some plot holes"

One of my biggest issues writing fics pulling from both the manga/BH and the 03 anime are Kimblee and Basque Gran. Kimblee’s personality differences are fairly easily explained - in one he was kept in isolation, in the other he was experimented on, and most of the rest happens late enough that it can be dismissed as responses to the different plots.

Gran is far, FAR more difficult. Putting aside the changes to his alchemy, the soldier who was willing to shoot his CO for immoral actions (and have Maes assist covering it up) is very different to the soldier who ordered Mustang to shoot civilian doctors or be executed.

Usually, people decide how much of an arsehole they want Gran to be and pick one or the other characterization, because they’re really quite different people. But what if (like me) you ever want to write a fusion?

My solution? Meet the Gran twins. 

  * Twin one, Basque Gran, the Iron-Blood Alchemist, who uses alchemy to turn his surroundings into weapons, who was on Maes’ squad in Ishval, and generally takes his personality from the manga and OVA.
  * Twin two, Tarsus Gran, the Blood-Iron Alchemist (because we have all seen Bradley’s naming abilities and anyone who calls an Armstrong ‘Strongarm’ will absolutely do the same here). He uses alchemy to encase himself in weapons, either takes over the role of the nameless officer who ordered Kimblee to kill the Rockbells in the manga or is the one who ordered Roy to in 03, and generally takes his personality from the first anime.



Despite being identical twins who did their apprenticeship together and have very similar alchemy styles, they do not get along. The Brass is very disappointed in this; the idea of identical twins was very appealing when they sat their Exams, with its significantly increased possibility of the pair pulling off combined arrays. But the more the Grans are confused for each other (each demands the other shave and neither will budge) and compared to each other, the more their philosophical differences grate, and by now the Brass has decided to try keeping them stationed separately. Preferably on opposite sides of the country.

Tarsus sneeringly calls his brother 'Biscuit’. In response Basque calls him 'Hard Tack’. This is sometimes what tips people off that there are two of them.

A convenient bonus of having twins, beyond mistake identity shenanigans: you can have Scar kill the brother of your choice and still have a spare for the later part of your plot.


End file.
